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Griffin State of Mind | Barbara Hitchcock

Posted on July 19, 2020

Snippet from Glasstire TV Curator Interview for “The Polaroid Project at the Amon Carter Museum of Art”

The alternative process powerhouse herself, Barbara Hitchcock gave us some of her time this past week so we could interview her via email.

She shared her latest insights with us and below are some of the ways she hops into her Griffin State of Mind.

Her strong voice in the art community has been a part of the Griffin journey for many years as she has even curated multiple shows for us.

We have always appreciated her true and authentic appreciation for the history of photography and the integration of all photographic processes to create imaginative masterpieces.

How long have you been part of the Griffin team and describe your role at the Griffin?

In 2006, Blake Fitch, the Executive Director then, and her team, established the Focus Awards and I was one of the awardees. I joined the Board of Directors shortly thereafter and continued on the Board the maximum number of terms and then became a Corporater.

I still serve at the discretion of the Board. Periodically, I have curated exhibitions displayed at the Griffin, among them William Wegman: It’s a Dog’s Life; Barbara Crane: Challenging Vision; Patrick Nagatani: Themes and Variations and most recently, Shadows and Traces: The Photographs of John Reuter.

Describe how you first connected with the Griffin.

The then director of the Griffin Center contacted me, asking me to do an exhibition at the Griffin that illustrated creative art photography, a departure from their usual practice. At that time, the center’s mission concentrated on photo illustration and journalism, highlighting the professional work of Arthur Griffin who established the Center that then evolved into the Griffin Museum.

I believe it was the 1990s. I hung an exhibition titled “New Dimensions in Photography” that featured artists making photographs using antique or alternative processes – cyanotypes on fabric, Polaroid image transfers on watercolor paper, platinum prints and the like.

How do you involve photography in your everyday?

I’ve started to take photographs again, much more than I used to. But I have been lucky as I have continued to curate exhibitions – the most recent titled The Polaroid Project: At the Intersection of Art and Technology currently at the MIT Museum – and I occasionally write about artists and their artwork for catalogs and books.

“From Polaroid To Impossible” By Barbara Hitchcock

Can you describe one photograph that recently caught your eye?

West Coast artists Victor Raphael and Terry Braunstein are collaborating on a series of images that deal with climate change. One dramatic, eye-grabbing image of a partia house on fire floats above palm trees into a hellishly scarlet sky scarred by black and red- reflecting clouds. A man, sitting on the edge of the house’s roof, weeps. The image is searing! Unfortunately, we know this image is not a warning, not fantasy. It is already a reality.

What has been the most eye opening part of our time of physical distancing?

How difficult physical distancing is. You want to embrace friends and family; people want that basic warmth of physical connection. And some people just don’t seem to know how far 6-feet away really is…or their attention is on other things as they wander into your path.

What is your favorite place to escape to in nature…mountains? beach? woods? and why?

I’ve always loved walking in the woods and going to the beach. I grew up in houses with yards, but my brothers and I always used to play in the lots that had underbrush and rocks where garden snakes unsuccessfully hid from us. Walking in wooded parks with the sound and sighting of birds, the smell of plants, trees and fallen pine needles, the occasional deer sighting, the quietude – it is like a loving embrace. And walking barefoot along the ocean with its crash of waves on the beach is similarly magical.

What is one book, song, or other visual obsession you have at the moment?

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway production Hamilton. The music, the choreography, the history, the emotion, the humanity. I still get goosebumps watching it!

If you could be in a room with anyone to have a one on one conversation about anything, who would that person be and what would you talk about?

Georgia O’Keeffe would be an irresistible choice. Her paintings make me weep; I don’t know why. She was such a talented, strong, independent woman who was married to Alfred Stieglitz, an incredibly strong, monumental, stellar figure in the world of art. How did they negotiate the life they shared together and apart that allowed them both to grow and succeed? That, I assume, would be a fascinating conversation.

What is one of your favorite exhibitions shown by the Griffin?

I have too many favorite exhibits to highlight only one. It would be unfair to the ones I don’t mention! In general, I am attracted to work that is experimental in nature, imaginative and pushes the envelope visually and intellectually. What is the artist communicating to the viewer through his/her photograph? Is there a subtle message or is the image straight forward and uncomplicated? Stop. Look. Ponder. What is being revealed?

July Photo Chat Chat | Member’s Exhibition Edition

Posted on July 16, 2020

Join us Thursday night July 16th for a chat with four artists participating in our 26th Annual Member’s Exhibition, curated by Alexa Dilworth.

Yorgos Efthymiadis

There Is a Place I Want to Take You I had an unsettling feeling when I returned, for the very first time after many years abroad, to the place of my origin. Even though I was surrounded by loved ones, friends and family who were ecstatic to see me, there was a sense of non-belonging. After a couple of days of catching up and hanging out, they returned to their routines. I stopped being their center of attention and became a stranger in a foreign land. It was harsh to come home, to a place which I banished in the past, only to realize that I have been banished in return. Time leaves its mark, transforms places, and alters people. Even the smallest detail can make a huge difference to the way things were. After moving away, I had to rediscover what I have left behind. Using my memories as a starting point, I walked down the road that led to my high school, I lay on the sand at the beach, close to the house where I grew up, I nodded to a familiar face I couldn’t quite place and yet they smiled back. All these round-trip tickets to the past, to a place that I once used to belong, reminded me one of Henry Miller’s quotes that always resonated with me: “One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.”

Leslie Jean-Bart

Have always found great comfort in or by the ocean.

The ocean has become the anchor for my current series, Reality & Imagination.

This ongoing series is a body of work of over 100 images that were edited from hundreds of images shot over the past 8 years. The images are squarely rooted in the tradition of Elliott Erwitt, Jay Maisel, Eugene Smith, Lou Draper, and sport photography. They are basically as they are in the instant shot.

I photograph the tide as visual metaphor to explore the dynamic interaction which takes place between the cultures when one lives permanently in a foreign land.

The cultures automatically interact with each other in a motion that is instantly fluid and turbulent, just as the sand and tide. It’s a constant movement in unison where each always retains its distinctive characteristics. This creates a duality that is always present.

The current climate towards immigrants in the US and the present migrant situation in Europe shows that the turbulent interaction between the duality created by the mix of the two cultures does not only manifest itself within the foreign individual but also within that foreign land.

Each of the sections of ‘Reality & Imagination’ explores this cultural duality. The section ‘Silhouette & Shadow’ and ‘Silhouette & Shadow Too’ I give an actual shape to the two cultures as silhouette & shadow, which are both entities that cannot exist without the presence of another. Just as the sand and the tide, a silhouette & or a shadow constantly moves in unison with the object the projected light uses to create it. In that instance, both the object and the shadow always retain each their individual characteristics.

‘Silhouette & Shadow Too’ addresses the phase where immigrants are visible to the dominant society only in limited capacity when needed, and the fact that the potential of enriching the society at large is short circuited.

Personally, the series has permitted me to readily welcome what’s good from both (all cultures in fact) and to let go from each what does not serve me as a human being. It has facilitated me to see at times what’s not readily seen as well as to be at times more present in life. It has given me the understanding that at every point I have the opportunity to act by choosing from within the structures of one of the two cultures what would serve best at that moment.

The constant intermingling of that duality is ever present.

Loli Kantor

For Time Is No Longer Now: A Tale of Love, Loss and Belonging My mother Lola died in Paris on January 21, 1952, after giving birth to me. My father Zwi died in Tel Aviv of a heart attack, March 1966 when I was 14 years old. My brother Ami died of a cardiac arrest in New York City on Thanksgiving Day, 1998. My immediate family: grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts and uncles perished in the Holocaust. My missing family created deep holes in my life—holes so deep that I have been driven to fill them in through a comprehensive and sometimes fevered search. Studying the archives of my family which I collected and saved through my life I uncover facts and information about my mother my father and my brother that help me to better understand their stories. I travel to the places from which my parents came, to where I was born and my mother died, to where I grew up and to times I barely remember, and even before. This is the soul of my work.These are visual disclosures including historical photographs, letters and documents, as well as new photographic works which I created to insert myself into the story of my lost family.

Geralyn Shukwit

For the past nine years, Brooklyn-based photographer Geralyn Shukwit has traveled the backroads of Bahia, Brazil, returning to the same communities year after year to form relationships with the families who reside there. O Tempo Não Para, Portuguese for “time does not stop,” is a personal documentation of those interactions and observations, a poetic record of Bahian life that prevails despite economic and environmental hardships. One of 26 states in Brazil, Bahia has a population of about 14 million in a region approximately the size of Texas. The Portuguese named it “Bahia” (“bay”) in 1501 after first entering the region through the bay where its capital, Salvador, is now located. An agricultural community, Bahians reside primarily in the cities and towns on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean, where the weather is slightly more forgiving than in Bahia’s harsh, arid interior region, the Sertão. Bahia has one of the highest rates of poverty in the country; mothers often have to fish to feed her children and in many communities, water only arrives by truck. Mostly of mixed European and African lineage, Bahians are overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, and many practice the rituals of Umbanda, Candomblé, and other syncretist religious sects. Cloaked in Bahia’s unique light, Shukwit’s intimate portrayal of daily life in Bahia offers viewers distinctly quiet, in-between moments laden with profundity. Underpinning the collective power of O Tempo Não Para is the photographer’s acute ability to cultivate trust and develop close connections with community members. Set in the extraordinarily colorful landscape of Bahia, a contrasting palette of bright, cool and warm colors, each photograph leaves traces of a culture seeped in the rituals and traditions that bind them.

Minny Lee | Artists Photobook Initiative

Posted on June 16, 2020

As part of the Griffin’s online offerings, we have a quarterly highlighted photobook artist. The artist currently featured is Minny Lee. Her beautiful, one of a kind, hand crafted books are precious objects. Our Executive Director, Paula Tognarelli, is a collector of photo books, and she asked Minny some questions about her work and inspiration.

I am fascinated by your combination of hand crafting of your books and involving a publisher in some of the mechanics. How do you decide when to use a bindery or to work on them yourself. Why Datz Press?

Encounters Maquette © Minny Lee

Over the years, I made different kinds of books, from one-sheet folded zines to 270-inch long scroll books with a custom box. Of these books, I published two with Datz Press: Encounters (2015) and Million Years (2018). Making one’s own book allows one to explore a wide range of materials, sizes, and binding techniques. The main reason for working with a publisher is to produce a larger number of books more efficiently. This also helps to disseminate the finished book to a larger audience. The challenge was to find a publisher that could reproduce my hand-made books in accordance with my concept, which was finalized after creating many, many maquettes.

Encounters, © Minny Lee

In December 2014, a mutual friend introduced me to Sangyon Joo, the publisher of Datz Press who was living in New York City at the time. I wanted to publish Encounters in time for a solo show in Seoul, South Korea. Datz Press was for me, love at first sight. I loved the sample paper and books that Sangyon brought to our meeting. Luckily, Datz Press was able to make Encounters in an edition of 100 in time for the exhibition. I am eternally indebted to Datz Press for their superb craftsmanship, professionalism, sublime aesthetics, and not compromising.

My final maquette for Encounters was printed on a roll of 44 inch wide and 176 inch long thin rice paper, which contained five strips that I had to cut and fold. Because the images were dark and the paper was thin, it often got jammed. It took me two weeks to make five books. Datz Press, on the other hand, printed three pages per sheet and attached several sheets to make a one-piece accordion. The book surpassed my expectations.

Million Years Maquette © Minny Lee

While Encounters was a self-published book, Million Years was a collaborative project. When I showed my latest maquette to Sangyon, she advised me to add more poems and informational text. After I finished with the final maquette, Datz Press enhanced my design. The book turned out much better than my original maquette. Datz Press participates in book fairs in the US and in South Korea and my books are often included in the offered collection. That’s another perk of working with a publisher.

You have mentioned in past conversations with me that you like to make books that the reader/viewer “experiences”. How do you go about doing that?

Books are magical; they bring us to places we may never have been to and expose us to stories that we may have not heard. I consider a book as a time-based medium and an object of art. Books require physical interactions; one must turn the pages to view. The touch of paper and sound of the turning all add to a physical experience of the book.

Resonance, © Minny Lee

Encounters measures to 7.5 inch high and 5.5 inch wide. Its small size creates intimate viewing. The title “encounters” is letterpressed onto the front side of the pale blue softcover. The spine does not have anything written on it. Paper is off white. It mimics rice paper. Each spread (two facing pages) allows only one image. Most images sit on the right side of the spread. After thirteen images, a one-page essay appears in pale blue, san serif typeface. When the viewer finishes reading my essay, they may travel to their own memory about nature. That’s my intention or invitation created by this book. The accordion folds allow continuous reading of the book. When the content is pulled out, it stands as a sculptural piece.

With Million Years, the editing and sequencing of the book with images and poetry were placed carefully in order to take the viewer into a lateral journey. There are four foldouts (gate folds). The first foldout has four landscape images without borders, as if it were a panorama. The second foldout has four images slightly different from each other to convey movement of the plane. The third foldout has three different cloud images. The forth one contains a long poem. Perhaps the goal of an artist is to take the viewer into a private experience of the world.

As an art book artist it isn’t about words per se. How do you communicate a narrative? Or is that secondary to the experience?

Narrative can come in different forms. With Encounters, I let the images speak first, utilizing the rhythm and color of pictures. Then at the end, I offer a little narrative about my upbringing in South Korea. With Million Years, images from the West Coast to the East Coast on a single airplane ride in chronological order lead the narrative. Poems in between images reflect on geology of the Earth. I tried to weave images and text together that are not explanatory but complimentary.

To me, the relationship between pages becomes a narrative—the author’s intended journey or path to navigate the book. It’s like a movie. There are feature films and documentary films that are filled with narratives. Then there are experimental and abstract films. They seem not to have narratives but clips are put together in a sequence, which becomes the narrative of the film. Every sequence has an intention of the director who is guiding the viewer’s journey.

How did you connect to books as a way of expression? How was that relationship forged?

Various artist’s book by Minny Lee.
Photo by Minny Lee.

The book as a medium is complex and challenging. As a medium of expression, I consider it as total art. A book can be visual, literary, sonic, experimental, performative, meditative, poetic, informative, scientific, investigative, and so on. I am attracted to the book’s ability to intertwine images and text. I take pleasure in designing the book and choosing the materials that meld its form and content together. Just like writing a novel, I can choose different voices, from the first person speaker to the third person speaker. I can travel across different time and place. Every part of the book requires decision-making, from the size of the font to the layouts to the margin of the pages. That deliberate decision-making requires me to be clear about my intention.

When I was young, my father used to ask my siblings and I if we read this book or that book. My father read widely from literature to psychology to philosophy. I felt huge pressure to read to avoid disappointing him. My 8^th grade teacher donated 100 world classic literature books to the class. He taught Korean literature and wrote poetry. These two people influenced me greatly. I started to collect books since the mid 90s when I was living in New York. I love books for their intrinsic physicality and their ability to transport me into a different world. When I was studying Documentary Photography at the International Center of Photography, I took Susan kae Grant’s bookmaking workshop in 2008. I learned a lot during that two-weekend workshop. Soon I realized that I could make my vision or dream into a book. Over the years, I’ve been asking myself, “What is a book?” Each time I make a new book, I am trying to answer to that question.

What books are in your library?

I will share some of my favorites from my library.

Literature/Philosophy/Psychology

Roland Barthes – Camera Lucida (1), Image – Music – Text (2)
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha – Dictee (1), Apparatus: Cinematographic Apparatus (2)
Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby (1), Tender is the Night
Herman Hesse – Demian (1), Narcissus and Goldmund (2)
Alexander Von Humboldt Botanical Illustrations
Carl Gustav Jung – The Red Book (1), Man and His Symbols (2), Memories, Dreams, Reflections (3)
Li-Young Lee – Rose
Rollo May – The Courage to Create
Mary Oliver – A Poetry Handbook
Sylvia Plath – The Collected Poems (1), The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2)
Richard Powers – The Overstory
Marcel Proust – In Search of Lost Time
Andrei Tarkovsky – Sculpting in Time
Henry David Thoreau – Walden (1), Walking (2), A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (3)
Ocean Vuong – Night Sky with Exit Wounds (1), On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2)
Virginia Woolf – The Waves (1), Orlando: A Biography (2), To the Lighthouse (3)
Andrea Wulf – The Invention of Nature

Photobooks/Artbooks

Robert Adams – Summer Night, Walking
Jehsong Baak – là ou ailleurs
Barbara Bosworth – Behold (1), Fireflies (2)
John Cage – 4’ 33’’ (1), Silence (2)
Harry Callahan – Water’s Edge
Linda Connor – Luminance
Joseph Cornell – Wanderlust
Moyra Davey – Les Goddesses Hemlock Forest
Roy Decarava – the sound i saw
Andreas Feininger – The Mountains of the Mind
Masahisa Fukase – The Solitude of Ravens
Eikoh Hosoe – Barakei (Ordeal by Roses)
Bill Jacobson – Place (Series)
MongGak Jeon – YoonMi’s House
Sangyon Joo – Grace and Gravity
Kinsey Photographer: A Half Century of Negatives by Darius and Tabitha May Kinsey
Hilma Af Klint – Notes and Methods
Gapchul Lee – Conflict and Reaction
Wayne Levin – Islands, Jeju
Danny Lyon – I Like to Eat Right on the Dirt (1), Knave of Hearts (2)
Amanda Marchand – Night Garden
Duane Michals – 50
Daido Moriyama – Dazai (1), Memories of a Dog (2), Farewell Photography (3)
Philip Perkis – The Sadness of Men
Gerhard Richter – Atlas
Michael Schmidt & Einar Schleef – Waffenruhe
Dayanita Singh – Sent a Letter
Keith Smith – Structure of Visual Book
Ralph Steiner – A Point of View
Larry Sultan – Pictures from Home
Yutaka Takanashi – Toshi-e (Towards the City): Books on Books No. 6
Calvin Tomkins – Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews

Who are your muses?

Nature

Mauna Kea

Sylvia Plath

Paul Cézanne

Duane Michals

KyungHwa Chung

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Kongji (my deceased dog)

Datz Press & Datz Museum

My classmates from the ICP-Bard MFA Program

About Minny Lee –

Minny Lee is a lens- based artist who is currently focusing on making artist’s books. Her work contemplates the concepts around time and space and the coexistence of duality. Lee was born and raised in South Korea and obtained an MA in Art History from City College of New York and an MFA in Advanced Photographic Studies from ICP-Bard. Lee was awarded a fellowship from the Reflexions Masterclass in Europe and participated in an artist-in-residence program at Halsnøy Kloster (Norway) and Vermont Studio Center. Her work has been exhibited at the Center for Fine Art Photography, Camera Club of New York, Datz Museum of Art (S. Korea), Espacio el Dorado (Colombia), Les Rencontres d’Arles (France), Lishui Photo Festival (China) among other venues. Lee’s artist’s books are in the collection of the International Center of Photography Library, New York Public Library, Special Collections at the University of Arizona, Special Collections at Stanford University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Amon Carter Museum Library, and many other private collections. Lee was based in the greater New York area for more than twenty years and recently relocated to Honolulu, Hawaii.

See more of Minny Lee‘s work on her website. To learn more about her book projects see her website dedicated to her Artist Books. Follow her on Instagram here.